David Robbins CIO, Ellie Mae

Ellie Mae, Inc., provider of automation solutions for the residential mortgage industry, announced that David Robbins, formerly the CTO of NetApp, Inc., has joined the company as its chief information officer.

 In this newly created position, Robbins will be responsible for designing, managing and assuring the scalability and reliability of Ellie Mae's data center operations to support the company's expanding software as a service business model. He will also manage the company's MIS, data security and technical operations.

Prior to joining Ellie Mae, Robbins spent over six years at NetApp. Most recently, from 2008 to 2011, he served as NetApp's CTO, where he developed a program to showcase best practice deployments and business impacts of storage and data management capabilities, and a technology roadmap and adoption strategy for IT systems, networks and storage. Earlier, as NetApp's vice president of global infrastructure from 2005 to 2008, he managed complex systems consisting of integrated Tier 1 applications and custom Tier 2 and Tier 3 applications, networks, telephony, data centers and infrastructure. During his 30-year career, he has held various management positions at Capgemini, Totality Corporation and Electronic Data Systems.

"Over the past two years, Ellie Mae has experienced four-fold increase in its SaaS user base. As we transition from an enterprise solution to SaaS, the reliability of our system becomes paramount, and the role of CIO even more critical," said Jonathan Corr, COO of Ellie Mae. "David's expertise will enable him to fast track our IT architecture and infrastructure transformations to accommodate the significant growth we are experiencing and to help deliver sustained client satisfaction. He is an excellent addition to the team."

In November, Ellie Mae announced that it had expanded its technology and operations team to address growth and build next generation systems. This team will now report to Robbins.